


Indiana Jones and the Coffin of Gold

by LemuelCork



Category: Indiana Jones Series
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-15
Updated: 2014-12-15
Packaged: 2018-03-01 14:58:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,073
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2777378
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LemuelCork/pseuds/LemuelCork
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post-RAIDERS, Marion goes searching for something of her father's, and finds more than she expects.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Indiana Jones and the Coffin of Gold

**Author's Note:**

  * For [alexcat](https://archiveofourown.org/users/alexcat/gifts).



"Indy, look out!" Marion swung the torch. It connected with the attacker's forearm like Bill Rigby knocking one out of Fenway, and the pistol he'd been holding went flying. Indy didn't even notice. He was preoccupied at the moment, grappling knuckle-to-knuckle with the other man, the giant in the fur vest and _xamo gyaise_. Indy brought a knee up into the man's midsection, doing no good at all. Wrenching one of his hands free, he aimed a punch at the cleft in the man's chin, but he might as well have been punching a wall.

The man Marion had hit grabbed hold of him from behind by the shoulders of his leather jacket and heaved Indy off his feet. Marion swung the sputtering torch again, this time connecting with the back of the man's neck, scattering embers and bits of charred wood. Then she realized there was a perfectly good pistol lying twenty feet away and dove for it. She came up a second later, gun held in front of her in both hands. Her heart was racing but her hands were steady enough. "Put him down," she said, then repeated it in Lhasa. The one she'd whacked turned toward her, Indy still struggling in his arms. 

"Marion," Indy said, hoarsely, from the arm across his windpipe, "shoot." 

"Put him down," she said again.

But now the other man, easily seven feet tall even in his flat-soled boots, had turned as well and pulled a vicious-looking knife from a pocket in his vest. He looked like he was deciding which of them to skewer first.

"Marion…?"

She pulled the trigger.

#

It all started with the mountain. Rearing up at the horizon, craggy and snow-capped, full of promise for an archaeologist or a fortune-hunter, so why hadn't she expected to find him there? But she hadn't. Indy wasn't being Indy these days, he was comfortably ensconced with his office hours and his academic conferences, his student advisees and the reference letters they kept begging him to write—he was comfortably ensconced in the brown tweed of Henry Jones, Junior, or at least she'd thought he was, and when the letter turned up from Abner's old dig partner, Marveille, she was damned if she'd strike the spark that put the bullets back in his chamber and the hat back on his head.

So she'd flown to meet Marveille alone, the way she'd done practically everything since she'd turned 16, and on the tarmac in Damxung she looked from her father's pencil sketch of the Nyenchen Taglha to the thing itself, looming 7,000 meters from ground to peak. Now, she knew a thing or two about Tibetan mountains, having chosen one for her home for a good three years—and they _had_ been a good three years, until Henry Jones, Junior, had dropped in for a visit, bringing Nazis in tow—but why her father thought a mountain in Tibet might be the final resting place for an artifact sought elsewhere since the year 453, she had no idea. But she knew better than to doubt him. Even dead, the man knew more things about more things than anyone else she'd ever met, Doctor Jones included.

So: to the mountain, stopping first at a waystation to provision their trip, which turned into a two-night stay when the storekeeper had offered them a sample of his local barley _chhaang_ and the third of the bottle Marveille consumed knocked the poor man on his ass. Marion barely felt hers and was impatient to get started, but she wasn't dragging a snoring drunk up the side of a mountain.

So. Three days by sledge, then two more on foot, then a trek along the bank of the Brahmaputra to the Yarlung Tsangpo, following Abner's notes all the way. Which wasn't easy, given the man's crabbed handwriting and his damnable tendency to leave out geographical details that he knew and didn't need to remind himself of. They took several false turns and lost hours recovering from them. But finally they reached the rock pillar he'd labeled "Aleph-J90" and the cave beside it and, walking inside, they'd seen the flickering torchlight on the walls, heard the scrape of a trowel on stone, then the whistling. Holy christ, was that _Sing, Sing, Sing_ …?

She'd unholstered her pistol as she'd crept toward the bend in the tunnel and, coming around, walked straight into his. They'd held each other at gunpoint for half a minute, emotions playing over their faces—surprise, anger, embarrassment—while Marveille looked from one to the other, and then scrambled in his pocket for his own gun.

"Don't bother," Marion said, easing the hammer down, "he's not going to shoot us." And she saw the crooked grin creep onto Indy's face as he lowered his gun.

She asked him, "What the _hell_ are you doing here?"

"Honey," he said, turning his back and returning to the wall he'd been working on, "I could ask you the same thing."

" _My_ father found this cave, and it's his notes we've been following. How did you…?"

"Who do you think was with him when he found it?"

Always. He _always_ had an answer, and how could you argue with that one? But— "Why are you here _now_?"

"Why'd you come now?"

"My father's notes—they were lost, but Jacques found them…"

"Well," Indy said, pushing gently on an indentation in the stone, "someone else found them first and sent portions to me in a letter." A section of the wall silently swung inward, revealing another tunnel, rough-hewn and pitch dark. He handed her the torch. "Coming?"

#

In 453, Attila the Hun, scourge of a continent, defier of two empires, father of numerous sons and ruler of a bloodthirsty people, died on his wedding night. Of a nosebleed, if you can believe that. Poisoned, if you can't. Sources differ. Some even put a dagger in the hand of his new bride, the Ostrogoth Ildico. Whatever the cause, die he did, and by repute he was buried in not one, nor two, but three coffins, one inside another: a coffin of iron, and inside that a coffin of silver, and inside _that_ , a coffin of gold.

His men brought the coffins by night to the Tisza River, diverted the flow of water, buried the triple coffin in the soft dirt of the riverbed, then removed their sandbags to let the water flow over it. 

Upon their return to the Hun camp, the men were all slaughtered, so that no one would ever know the coffins' location.

#

"Do you really believe…?"

"It's not a question of believing, Marion. It's a question of fact. The coffins were never found. They must be somewhere."

"But four thousand miles away—"

"Cairo is six thousand miles from Washington D.C.," Indy said, his voice carefully lowered. "And we know some artifacts that have made that trip."

"In a truck, a ship, a submarine, and an airplane!"

"That just means it would've taken longer, not that it's impossible. Listen," and Indy put a hand on her arm, in a way she knew he meant to be comforting, reassuring, but that she found absolutely infuriating. She shook it off. "Marion, it may not be Attila buried here, but _someone_ is. That pillar outside marks this as a tomb. We ought to find out whose."

Behind them, Marveille, who had been following in discreet silence, called, " _Arrêtez_ ," and when they turned to look, he had a hand up for silence and his head cocked to one side. They listened, and then they could hear it too: a steady drip of water on stone, and behind that, almost too quiet to make out, a droning sound, as of a hundred voices softly chanting.

#

The prayer wheel was enormous, the largest she had ever seen. Even Indy seemed to be taken aback at the sight of the carved cylinder, several meters high, turning slowly on a spindle, the carved Tibetan script on its surface bathed with a golden glow from tallow flames in bowls held in shallow recesses along the walls. A procession was circumambulating around its base, adherents in robes and cowls, while off to one side a huge man in a fur vest and _xamo gyaise_ hat stood turning a heavy crank in slow, grinding circles. The men were all silent or whispering at most; what had seemed the sound of chanting was in fact the groan of the heavy cylinder rotating on its axle, air moaning low as it was forced through gaps in the mechanism.

Indy raised a finger to his lips then indicated with a gesture that Marveille should circle around the other way. They were on a raised gallery slightly overlooking the floor, crouched down behind a low stone wall. The gallery continued in either direction around the wheel. Nodding, keeping low, Marveille headed off on the clockwise path, and a moment later Indy led Marion around the other way. 

"What is this place?" Marion hissed. "I thought you said it was a tomb."

"It's supposed to be," Indy said. "None of this was here ten years ago."

Or you just didn't find it then, Marion thought, but it wasn't worth saying out loud; not when any sound they made increased their chances of getting caught.

They reached the far side, where a pair of tall metal doors, tarnished from decades if not centuries of tallow smoke, stood closed and barred. They waited for Mervaille to rejoin them.

Suddenly Indy tensed. "You hear that?"

"What?" Marion whispered. Then: "I don't hear anything." 

"Exactly," Indy said, worried, and he approached the low stone wall and peered over it. The prayer wheel had ground to a halt, and the huge crank stood alone and unattended.

He whirled back toward Marion, already rising from his crouch. "Come on—"

At that instant, from the shadows on the far side of the door came the sound of heavy footsteps, and the man in the vest appeared, marching slowly toward them, carrying Marveille by the neck in one hand. He hurled him aside, and the position of the Belgian's body where it lay left no doubt as to whether he was alive or dead. 

Indy dashed forward, drawing his gun as he ran, but the giant strode toward him just as quickly and batted Indy's arm aside even as he pulled the trigger. The bullet went zinging off overhead, striking stone chips from one wall and then ricocheting off another. The gun plummeted to the floor below.

The giant lifted Indy bodily off the ground, but Indy head-butted him, drawing blood from his nose, and the man reflexively let go as his hands flew to his face. Indy staggered back. 

Marion was at the door, struggling to raise the heavy iron bar from its brackets. Indy took the other end and together they lifted it out. Holding it tightly in both arms, Indy swung it at the giant, who had started rushing forward again. The momentum as the bar plowed into his sternum drove the man back. But he took hold of it and wrenched it from Indy's grip. 

Indy duck as it swung over his head. From the corner of his eye, he saw Marion pulling her gun—but then she was grabbed from behind, the gun yanked from her hand and tossed aside. She didn't spend a moment lamenting its loss, though she damn well had a right to—instead, she dropped to one knee, pivoted and pulled the son of a bitch over her shoulder, ramming his head into the metal door with the resounding thud of a mallet against a gong.

But a third attacker arrived, running toward where Indy was now grappling, knuckle-to-knuckle, with the much larger man, blood still running from his nose, and as she watched, this new man reached beneath his robe and she knew nothing good was going to come out of it. She looked around desperately.

She reached out, grabbed a torch from a bracket on the wall, and swung it at the attacker's arm…

#

Marion's bullet went through the giant's throat, and he fell back, gasping, the knife clattering to the ground.

Indy reached for it with the toes of his boots, but it was an inch too far. Just an inch! But this inch might as well have been a mile. 

Marion turned the gun on the struggling pair, but she couldn't risk a shot—their heads, their torsos, were lined up. There was no shooting one without hitting the other.

Meanwhile, the man's iron forearm was choking what little air remained out of Indy's aching lungs.

He reached once more for the knife, then gave up, planted his feet against the ground and drove straight back. The man wasn't ready for it and smashed into the wall behind him. Had it merely been a wall, the impact would only have stunned him for an instant. But this wall held one of the shallow, carved recesses and the recess held one of the burning bowls of tallow, and the impact jarred the bowl, spilling the fluid all over the man's robe. In an instant the flame had leapt to the saturated fabric and he was ablaze. He ran screaming, leaving Indy to beat out the few small flames on his own clothes.

Marion was breathing heavily, gripping the gun tightly. Indy came over, lifted her chin with one finger, kissed her gently on the cheek. "Thank you," he said.

"Don't thank me yet, Jones. There's more where they came from."

"Maybe not in there," he said, and put a shoulder to the great iron doors. Slowly they swung inward. He pulled Marion in after him and forced the doors shut again. 

Beyond them, across a small chamber hewn into the rock, was another pair of doors, almost identical, except that these were brightly polished, untarnished by smoke. Approaching, they could see themselves reflected in the metal's surface.

This pair opened outward, and took real effort by both of them to drag apart even after the bar had been lifted and set aside. And through _these_ doors…

The third chamber was larger, much larger, with a row of cages on either side and a stone dais in the center, but at its far end, again, a pair of doors stood, this set lit by reflected torchlight, glowing golden and crimson and gold again as the flames danced.

Not all the cages were empty. In one, a man half sat, half lay, in a painful-looking crouch, his head resting against the bars. When he saw them he started. "Henry…?" His voice was hoarse from unuse. And then it was choked with emotion when he saw who was standing behind Indy. "Marion!"

They both ran to him where he gripped the bars. Indy narrowed his eyes, trying to find a face he knew beneath the heavy growth of graying beard, the layers of grime. But Marion knew at once. "My god. How can it…? You—you—I was told you'd died, an avalanche…"

The old man shook his head. "I can't explain it. I think I did. They…they brought me back somehow. They've held me ever since. You can't imagine what I had to do to get those letters smuggled out to Jacques and Henry, directing them to my notes…"

"Abner," Indy said.

"Henry," Abner Ravenwood said. And then his face turned grave. "But Marion, what are you doing here? Where is Jacques?"

"He's dead," Indy said. "We've got to get you out of here." He hunted around quickly, found a stone near the wall. "Step back." With three quick blows he smashed the lock off the cage. 

Abner could barely stand, though with care he did. He leaned on his daughter's shoulder and she put a hand across his back to support him. "I didn't want you involved, I never…"

"No, you never did, dad. I keep getting involved anyway. Sorry to be such a disappointment."

"Never, Marion. Never." His voice faltered. "But your mother, if she knew…"

"She stopped knowing things a long time ago, dad. Come on." And she drew him toward the torchlit doors.

"Not that way, no—"

"We've got no choice," Indy said. "There are thirty men out there, waiting for us. They must think they've got us trapped."

"They do," Abner said, and the despair in his voice was palpable. "They do."

"What's through that door, Abner?"

The old man's voice shook. "I was their, their trial run. To see if they could do it. When they found me, I'd been covered by the ice just a few days. My heart had stopped, but… Oh, Henry, don't you see? They didn't care about me. They're after something much grander."

Something dropped for Indy, you could see it in his eyes. Marion knew that look. It could be a dangerous one. When the Ark had been opened…

"The tomb," Indy said. "You were on the trail of the coffins. Did you _find_ them? Did they?"

"Oh, Henry, don't you see? They weren't there to find. There were no coffins brought across thousands of miles. The coffins were built here, in these mountains, in these caves. You're standing in them, Henry."

And Indy looked back, toward the polished silver doors they'd entered through, and past them the tarnished iron ones. His head turned slowly toward the gold doors at the far end of the chamber. 

"The coffin of gold," he muttered. 

"Yes, Henry. The final resting place of the Hun king. His body is here. They've worked on it for centuries. They want to bring him back!"

"This is insane," Marion said. "We're leaving."

"How?" Abner asked, simply.

At that moment, a sound came from the other side of the silver doors, as of the bar on that side being replaced. They were trapped indeed. Deep inside the mountain, far from civilization or human contact, alone with whatever was on the other side of those golden doors. Indy walked to them and with all his strength toppled the long golden bar from its brackets. It crashed loudly to the floor.

"Henry, you don't know what you're dealing with," Abner whispered.

"I generally don't," Indy said. He held a hand out toward them. "Are you coming?"

 

_WILL INDY AND MARION ESCAPE?_

_WHAT—OR WHO—AWAITS THEM INSIDE THE COFFIN OF GOLD?_

_JOIN US NEXT WEEK, ADVENTURERS, FOR THE NEXT EXCITING CHAPTER!_

#

**Author's Note:**

> "The word is adventure. Take them on an adventure!" wrote my recipient. A better prompt I couldn't imagine. And yet...a whole adventure? That would take many more words than I could manage for a Yuletide story. Heck, it could take a novel. So I thought I'd harken back to the old days and the movie serials that inspired George Lucas and Steven Spielberg in the first place, where an adventure would be divided up into perhaps a dozen or two dozen chapters (or "episodes"), each one starting at a moment of great excitement and each one ending with a proper cliffhanger. Apologies in advance if it takes more than a week to get our heroes out of the terrible bind I've left them in. Who knows what they'll find beyond that golden door. But it was great fun to get them there....


End file.
